WHAT’S YOUR STATUS: EMPLOYEE FAIRNESS PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING

Abstract

Social media has gained widespread popularity as a communication tool for individuals to share opinions, stories, and maintain relationships. For the individual user, this online activity might instinctively seem to be a personal expression among “friends”. However, many organizations are using social media activity to identify problem employees, which has created confusion regarding the ethical and legal boundaries of this issue. From an employer’s perspective, there is an immediate concern for monitoring their employees’ social media sites for any inappropriate, damaging, or confidential information they might share online that could seriously damage an employer’s reputation and brand. The employees, however, may feel this practice is unfair and violating their privacy when their organizations are terminating based on these personal social accounts. This study looked at the perspective of current employees on their perception of fairness when organizations monitor their employee’s social media activity. In particular, this study examined the relationship between privacy invasiveness, negative social media posts, and concerted activity and their effects on employee’s perceptions of fairness about social media monitoring. Key findings include a significant main effect for privacy invasiveness on ratings of both process fairness and decision fairness. Negative social media posts were also had significantly related to process fairness and decision fairness, but both of those relations showed small effect sizes. Concerted activity did not have any significant effects, and there were no significant interactions.